Seventy beats per minute against one hundred and forty-six. 'Bella' opens 'New Life' at 70 BPM in A-flat minor, a half-time pulse that gives away nothing of what follows: the other nine cuts cluster between 139 and 146. Ellen Allien builds her return —her first album in six years, per Beatportal— on exactly that kind of extreme, and the rest of the record keeps dealing them out with intent.
F major amid the shadows
The most eloquent contrast isn't speed but colour. Eight of the ten tracks live in raw, hypnotic techno territory and nearly all sit in minor keys, but 'Steh Auf' —the lead single, described by the label itself as the album's rousing centre— breaks rank twice: it's the only peak-time cut and one of just two escapes into a major key. The other is 'Lights Off', in A major; there's a fine irony in the title that switches the lights off being one of the few that turns them on harmonically. On the opposite shore, 'Mein Herz' slips out of techno into indie dance at 146 BPM, the record's fastest mark.
Durations draw the same map of tensions: 'Move It' stretches its hypnosis to 5:18 while 'Wonderful Moment' dispatches its euphoria in 3:47. BPitch notes the material was recorded between Berlin, Miami and Ibiza, in winter sessions spread over several years, with Allien's spoken voice running through the whole; that explains how demolition tools like 'Riot' coexist with textures the label rightly calls emotional rave music.
The message —personal autonomy, collective responsibility, the planet's beauty under threat, per BPitch's own notes— also reads in the titles as opposing pairs: standing up ('Steh Auf') against drifting away ('Cruising', the closer, at the main block's lowest BPM); the mutiny of 'Riot' against the opening calm of 'Bella'. A record defined less by its average than by its edges.
Sources: BPitch Control · Beatportal